Designers must account for people’s emotional and cognitive responses to three aspects or levels inherent in any design: visceral (immediate, automatic, appearance-based); behavioral (function, pleasure and effectiveness of use); and reflective (personal satisfaction through memories, self-image, intellectualization.) The things we like act as symbols to us and have meaning in our lives. Norman describes and shows many examples of designs that successfully tap into a person’s affect – their subconscious value judgments that translate into emotions. Good designs are also rhetorical: they fit a particular context, culture, location, and audience, so no one design can be univerally appealing. Good designers are those who are able to keenly observe people’s behaviors and tap into people’s unarticulated needs, seeing the product not as a decontextualized thing but something that is used by someone.

Quotable Quotes

William Morris: If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” (“The Beauty of Life” 1880)

“The emotional side of design may be more critical to a product’s success than its practical elements” (5)

Notable Notes

cupholders as an unarticulated consumer need

personalization and customization

good designs seduce people – Csikszentmihalyi’s flow

success at the reflective level can outweigh the other two aspects – visceral and behavioral

Robillard argues that teachers’ affective response to plagiarized student texts – justified anger – needs to be acknowledged and accepted by the discipline and used as way 1. to tap into a full understanding of plagiarism as a relationship between a writer and a reader and 2. to engage the public in conversations about writing and plagiarism. Teachers surpress their anger because they have conflicting identities as writing teachers: the caring, nuturing, student-centered, critical-pedagogy empowering teacher and the objective expert on writing and the teaching of writing. Plagiarism challenges and threatens this split identity, and the discipline has sought solutions for this problem by finding pedagogical solutions and explanations (patch-writing, summarizing.) Robillard uses teachers’ blogs to show how teachers are expressing their anger outside traditional disciplinary venues.

Quotable Quotes

“Writing teachers become dehumanized, disembodied readers of student work” (28) – what happens when their anger is denied

“We cannot have it both ways; we cannot create an identity dependent on a relationship to students that is emotionally supportive at the same time that we maintain our affectless response to plagiarism or suspected plagiarism” (27).

“To deny anger when students we care about plagiarize is to deny our humanity” (27).

“The absence of disciplinary sponsored anger in response to plagiarism thwarts our efforts to make ourselves heard in public discussions about writing in this country” (13).

“anger as social rather than individual, as political rather than neutral” (17)

“The near erasure of teachers’ anger in composition’s scholarship on plagiarism must be read as symptomatic of a disciplinary discourse that, despite much important research to the contrary, persists in suppressing the role of the reader – here, the embodied reader – in interpreting plagiarized texts” (11)

Notable Notes

the anger somewhat stems from the feeling that you were so close to missing it, to not catching plagiarism (18)

this widespread anxiety leads to an obsession to prevent plagiarism

the public doesn’t respect us (Tucker Carlson on Becky Howard’s plagiarism article) because we don’t seem angry about plagiarism, we shouldn’t keep suppressing this “collective rage” (29)